Welcome to the first fall 2026 edition of the reading list! Here’s where I’m turning as summer moves into fall.
How about you? Let me know what you think, and maybe what you’re reading these days.
Attitudes toward sex work have split leftists for decades. The trouble with sex work is that it pushes people into sharply opposed camps. Two camps begin with certain assumptions, dig in, and then come up with little in the way of productive engagement with the other side.
But I think we can remedy this. As it happens, the two camps each base their views around a core truth.
By excavating these two core truths, we can come up with a better approach.
So, we’re coming up to the end of summer! Let’s talk about summer reading as we move toward Labor Day. What are you reading these days? Here’s what I’m reading.
In a recent issue focused on the U.S. constitution – not the best issue topic, but I digress – Jacobin published an interesting discussion between Anand Gopal and Ben Burgis on sortition.
For those not hip to fancy terms, ‘sortition’ refers to government by lot. It’s the random selection of public officials among regular citizens. It’s associated mainly with ancient Athens, notably the period around the time of the trial and execution of Socrates.
As a college student over 20 years ago, it was fashionable to identify as a person who voted ‘based on issues’ rather than based on party.
You probably know the idea. You didn’t just vote for a candidate because they ran as a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Green. Rather, you looked carefully at their platform and voted for the person who ticked the right boxes.
Admittedly, we weren’t as clever as we thought. For leftists, the idea was to talk tough to Democrats. We said to them that we had certain issues we prioritized – health care, and so on – and we’d abandon the Democrats if they weren’t willing to fight for those issues. We announced our intention to vote for Ralph Nader – or an appropriate Nader equivalent – if Democrats failed to get with the program.
In practice, though, leftists rarely carried out the threat. Democrats repeatedly shunned universal health care. Most leftists continued voting for them anyway.
No doubt people at other points on the political map ran their own version of this. Centrists looked to candidate platforms to ward off ‘extremists.’ And right-wingers wanted to see the greatest hits of their own policy goals, lest they vote for some obscure right-wing third party. They didn’t carry out the threat, either, though they seemed to have more success at pushing their own views on party leaders.
